Posts by deadbeef

Have patience!

Rushing an unfinished VR product to the consumer market would be a big mistake as Oculus has already said to Sony. If the product isn't fully ready and tested with all the motion issues sorted then consumer users will get motion sickness and could very well put everyone off using VR ever again and turn VR into a flop.

Yes everyone is excited and wants VR products right now (myself included) and it is taking time to get to market, but rushing and releasing a buggy unfinished product would be worse. You only have to take a look at some of the comments on Steam to see what happens when a developer releases a v1.0 product which is clearly unfinished and is still Early Access beta or even alpha quality.

Personally I would rather they took the time to ensure that the quality is there.

Re: And Dropbox too

Forget Truecrypt. If you want client side encryption for Dropbox, Skydrive or GoogleDrive then use BoxCryptor. It works directly at a file/folder level (rather than having to dump a huge Truecrypt volume on your cloud drive which has to resync the whole truecrypt file every time you make a tiny change to your files). I've been using boxcryptor for years and it works great. Its fast and is completely transparent once you map a drive.

Re: Faster phone ?

"I really can't imagine anyone doing a real world test would conclude the iPhone was a slow-coach."

Once iOS7 appears then we shall see how the current iPhone hardware handles real-world tests once *full* "proper" multi-tasking comes into play like Android has been doing for a very long time. That is when you realise that you suddenly need plenty of RAM, CPU grunt, battery power and good power management (which the S3, S4 and HTC One actually do very well at). It will be interesting to see what iPhone hardware actually gets the iOS7 update with full multitasking.

Re: "fast enough"

"What new OS will be released to the Galaxy S3 this year, let alone the S2 "

Android 4.2.2 official update is coming to the S3 any time now and probably the S2 (of course there is XDA for those who can't wait). Then Keylime Pie (Android 5.0) should be on the way next. So that's Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean and Keylime Pie major OS updates for the S3 for starters.

Re: Surprise - another US Court that fails to find against Apple...

The problem with Gorilla glass is that most people believe that its "toughness" feature is to resist breakage when in fact it is to resist scratching. Gorilla glass is misleading in itself regardless of what product it it used on.

My Galaxy S3 uses Gorilla Glass 2 and the screen is still extremely vulnerable to damage if it is dropped just like glass in general. That's why I bought a thin rubbery gel glove cover for it which absorbs some of the impact energy if it is dropped.

Re: Nope

@AC

I was referring to the form factor and appearance (which is what Apple tries to have an issue with other tablet makers like Samsung), we are not talking about the specifications or external addons like pen, keyboard (Asus Transfomer like) or hidden internal HDD.

So essentially what you are saying is that if the Samsung Tab had come out with a pen, an internal HDD/SSD and detachable external keyboard that Apple wouldn't have claimed it was an iPad "clone"? The main thing Apple is arguing about is the form factor and rounded corners even to the point of fiddling photos to make it look like the same size aspect ratio.

The point is there have been loads of previous prior art devices released that had the same or very similar physical form factors as the iPad/iPhone even some with a single central button at the bottom. Apple should just move on an stop nit picking and suing over stupid things like this just because they don't like competition.

Re: now make a subsitute

@AC "So now try to replace Windows phone with Android and you will see that it won't make any sense!. Cause to run android you need 2 core 1G memory whereas a windows phone happilly runs on 500MB"

Well that's odd then, how come my HTC HD2 (pre-win mob 6.5) phone is running Gingerbread fast with the 500MB RAM with 1 single core Snapdragon CPU and many times faster than the abortion that was Win Mobile that was on there before?

Regarding the Truecrypt approach isn't it rather inefficient to create a Truecrypt file to store files in on your cloud storage and then every time you change a single file the whole massive Truecrypt file has to be uploaded again to be in-sync?

Is this the way it works or does it realise that only certain bits of the Truecrypt file has changed?

For that reason I use Boxcryptor with Dropbox as it just encrypts individual files.

It would be nice if these services provided "client side" encryption by default. Yes I know its encrypted at the server end but its well known that Dropbox employees can get at those files if they needed to.

DB2

Wouldn't surprise me if IBM decided to join the party and yank DB2 from Itanic just to stir things up even more so that they can mop up all the customers from the sinking ship. Probably more profitable in the long run rather than pouring gobs of money into further developing DB2 for a dead platform with such a small market share. Probably what Oracle were thinking.

RE: It's not just the iPhone

But your describing a different problem there all together. Bluetooth, GPS + charging in a car and heating up resulting in signal drop? The iPhone issue is when just simply holding the phone. I can't say I've seen the signal symptoms you describe when stationary in my car using Sat Nav software with GPS. I could understand it if your driving around though, as that's to be expected.

What I certainly know for sure though is that when holding my HTC HD2 normally in either my left or right hand it doesn't have signal drop offs. In fact I even see the HSDPA or 3G signal bars increase on occasion.

I only see the signal drop a bar or two ONLY if I completely wrap both hands around ALL edges of the entire phone (extreme case obviously). But it never drops to the point where I have poor or no signal like on my girlfriends iPhone 4G. If I have say 2 bars of HSDPA signal and I wrap both my hands around it and two bars drop down, then it switches down to 4 bars of 3G. Still a very very strong signal. Even in a bad signal area and loosing the 3G signal it would still be fine dropping down to 4 bars of slower GPRS signal.

RE: AC and Jim Booth

"More customers than ever before are choosing faster broadband, for the 20 minutes it takes before you're capped"

There is NO cap on the 50Mb package.

"Their traffic management is utter shite and combined with their Mumbai Monkeys call centres just goes to show that customers are an afterthought."

VM don't traffic manage (i.e. slow specific traffic). They cap after X GB download on non-50Mb services but that's capping not traffic management. I agree about the monkeys in the call centres though, but I very rarely have to call them thankfully and certainly not on broadband issues as mine has been pretty much rock steady for the 10+ years I've used their broadband services.

Patent troll alert! Another SCO wannabe

"We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours" - said the pot calling the kettle black. Just how many things has Apple nicked then? Nokia and Kodak certainly think they have.

Apple was last into the phone market and there is a list as long as my arm of things that they have copied from other smartphones and PDAs.

I suspect that they are just scared of the upcoming competition from HTC with the HD2 coming to the US soon as well as upcoming Android devices. If they are going after Android then they could end up like SCO. Never upset the open source masses as they will rip you a new one.

Still down

I ordered a laptop through the outlet on the 17th of Feb and my internet receipt still hasn't been converted into an order yet. IF you can get through to the right person you find out that their ordering system is still down and should have been back up on Thursday. Its still down today. They could at least send customers an email to let them know that there is a problem and provide updates.

Caps

Virgin don't cap their top tier service (currently at least). I suspect it will remain this way for the 50MB+ crowd simply because the 50MB+ modems can't be cloned like the slower packages and uses bonded channels which have less contention impact I believe.

From what I understand, all the cloned modems on the 10MB/20MB services is why virgin has to use caps. A huge percentage of the traffic usage on their network is due to cloned modems and so to restrict the impact they cap the hackable 10MB/20MB services. Once all the services move up to the newer DOCSIS modems (currently only used on 50MB+) *hopefully* the capping will be relaxed or eliminated for all. Again it seems like it is a few rotten apples that have to wreck things for people.

For me, my 50MB service is top notch. No caps and I get the full 50MB at all times of the day and rock solid up time.

USB 3.0

"Will Apple seize the initiative and become one of the first vendors to ship a computer with integrated USB 3.0 - aka SuperSpeed USB?"

One of the first? Asus, Gigabyte and others have been shipping motherboards using USB 3.0 for some time now and there are complete systems already out there using them. HP is already shipping a laptop with USB 3.0 (HP Envy 15).

@PushF12

Are you using ZFS root? If so the menu.lst / grub.conf is now in your zfs root pool rather than under /boot. Also I think they did away with menu.lst and replaced it with grub.conf if I remember rightly.

@ Matt Bryant

"Well, seeing as both hp and Intel make money from Intanium (more than Sun is making from SPARC by a country mile), and both hp and Intel have plenty of cash for develpment,"

Based on the current climate where no company or product is safe, I'm willing to bet Itanic is at the top of the scrapheap for junking by Intel as they cut jobs, close plants to try and cut costs like everyone is doing right now. Itanic is dead, no one cares about it.

Beefcake!

RE: Youre making a huge assumtion...

I have to agree with Kevin here. The whole market is in the pits at the moment and few tech companies are going to avoid the current downturn. You only have to look at the share price of IBM, HP, MSFT and others to see this and Sun is no different. Sun unfortunately was still in the process of trying to recover its stock price when this downturn hit and with all the short selling of stock that happens these days (should be illegal really) it really give a false impression of how a company is performing. You only have to look at Sun's revenues to see how much cash it brings in each quarter, the issue is to reduce costs and improve profits which it is doing. Sun has some awesome products right now and it is set to come out of the downturn on top if it gets things right.

As for someone buying Sun, its possible but I don't think anyone can afford to splash out cash right now during these hard times. A takeover would be bad for competition and ultimately for the customer and the innovations that Sun comes up with.